A number of Senators have left, most notably Steve Fielding. Of the departures from the major parties, perhaps the most significant is Nick Minchin; Crikey has the valedictory speeches of the departing Senators, many of which are worth a read. Nick Xenophon remains, but his influence is much diminished.

Bernard Keane predicts that the results of the new Senate makeup will be hard to predict.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Andrew Bartlett’s view.

It’s required reading, I think.

In other news, the Governor-General has received written advice from the Solicitor General that she has no conflict of interest, and you can read it here.

A hung parliament and a new Senate in which the Greens will have the balance of power and, most likely, a presence of which few of their number would have dared dream.

The mainstream media have been curiously reticent to say it, but the electorate lurched sharply to the Left yesterday. Labor bled just more than 5% of its vote, but most of it — 3.6% — went to the Greens. The Coalition picked up the scraps.

That’s why Labor is still jockeying for government today and hasn’t been obliterated, and why the Greens will have nine senators next year.

The parliamentary calculus for the British election was of course different: a Labour minority government would have had a bare majority, but adding the Lib Dems to the Tory benches delivered a substantial majority in the House of Commons, bigger than that which has often enabled a single party to govern. That’s not the case here – whichever way the seats finally fall, any government will rest on a very slim majority. So, in parliamentary terms, there’s not a compelling stability case for either side.

In this parliament, each division will be key, and by-elections could change the partisan complexion of the House.

In Britain, the danger for the Liberal Democrats is that they bleed support to their left, because their main opposition in most of the seats they hold is the Tories. In other words, they’re in government with the party which could take seats from them, and opposition within those seats coalesces around Labour.

In our parliament, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott sit for seats which in their absence would be held by the Nationals, who are their major opponents in elections. Bob Katter’s electorate is different – the Nats have tried very hard to take it off him in the part, but Kennedy has also been held by Labor in living memory.

So, there’s some logic in their support for an ALP minority government, aside from the other factors I identified last night. To retain their seats, they’re better off not being embraced by their partisan enemies at electorate level.

The calculus for Adam Bandt in Melbourne is different: he can only hold his seat by continuing to fend off Labor, but, conversely, he needs to keep the support of left wing voters who would be horrified if he were to prop up a Coalition government.

The other difference with Britain is that there’s the promise of a change to the electoral system. In the medium term, Labor might have much to gain from a shift to a much more proportional voting system, given the strength of The Greens’ vote outside its former inner city redoubts. Some sort of modus vivendi between Labor and The Greens needs to be reached – the strategy of effectively taking the smaller party for granted, and hoping to reap sufficient support from swinging voters on the right clearly failed.

Another factor is that a Labor/Greens majority in the Senate which will take office next July promises a more stable environment for a non-Coalition government. But we have the intriguing position where the numbers in the House are so tight, there may well be another general election for the House of Reps in short order.

Interesting times for Australian politics.

That seems odd, doesn’t it?

In mid-July, not so long before the election was called, I spent a few days on holiday in Toowoomba, at a B&B catering for the “weary urbanite”. My partner and I weren’t the only urban visitors to the Garden City that week, though: Bob Brown and Greens Senate candidate Larissa Waters were also in town.

Brown and Waters were out and about on the Darling Downs to highlight the hot issue of coal seam gas mining and exploration on farm land. That issue later got even hotter, when an experimental coal seam gasification plant near Kingaroy was shut down, after groundwater was found to be contaminated.

The Greens’ tour of the Downs was favourably covered by local media, and attracted lots of favourable comment.

In an interesting post published last night, long time political observer Richard Farmer debunked the claim that The Greens’ support always goes backwards from the polls to election day, and speculated on the distribution of their increased vote in inner-urban areas.

But on a host of issues, including development and mining exploration but also “food security”, The Greens have been preparing the ground to reap a rural and regional harvest, particularly in Queensland and New South Wales. So their vote in the regions, which would help their Senate chances measurably in both states, will also be worth watching.

And the alliance between Green urbanites and farmers might also place a few stereotypes under the spotlight.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

For those who might not be aware of how this works, if you vote “above the line” (that is, if you put a 1 in one of the parties’ or grouped and ungrouped candidates’ box), then your preferences are allocated according to a ticket lodged with the Electoral Commission.

There is also the option of voting “below the line”, but that can be a bit of an ask where there are up to 84 Senate candidates to number sequentially (I think that’s the largest number this election – in NSW).

There’s a lot in them to digest, but commentary so far has focused on two aspects:

(a) The ALP has given its preferences straight to The Greens in Victoria, atoning for the 2004 debacle which saw Steve Fielding elected;

(b) The Democrats in the ACT have preferenced the Liberals ahead of The Greens. No doubt they’ll not poll well, but in a contest where The Greens have some chance of defeating the incumbent Liberal, every preference is potentially important.

Elsewhere: An Onymous Lefty.

Update: [by Kim] Lots of easily scannable detail from William Bowe at The Poll Bludger.

On the slightly calmer side of the fence, analysts have continued to point to the fact that:

the minority Greens have gained more than the Coalition from the fall in support for the government and Green preferences will eventually flow back to Labor…

A lot of the assumptions people have been making about the prospective outcome of this year’s election, however, might be wrong.

Let’s deal with them in turn:

First, we have to question what Possum calls the “ALP Protected Left Flank Hypothesis”. This is something I commented on in an earlier post, and if you haven’t read Possum’s superb and analytically rich post on Greens preferences, you really must.

The hypothesis Possum refers to underlies the sorts of commentary we see all over the place (and the example above from Geoffrey Barker at Inside Story is just that), and it would seem, the strategic thinking of ALP apparatchiks and consultants:

This theory relies on the assumption that there are a fixed number of left leaning voters that nearly all give the ALP their two party preferred vote. According to the theory, as left voters move from the ALP to the Greens, the ALP primary vote goes down, the Green primary vote goes up and the rate of Greens preference flows to the ALP increases as a result of these ex-ALP-come-Greens voters sending their two party preferred preferences back to Labor in very substantial numbers.

But this is not, he argues, what the polls have actually been showing:

as the Coalition primary vote has increased, so too has the size of the Greens preference flows to the Coalition – from a low of 15% in November through to a high of 32% this month. In functional terms, the observable relationship between the Coalition primary vote and Greens preference flow is the same as the relationship between the ALP primary vote and Greens preference flows – as the generic popularity of a major party increases (measured by the size of their own primary vote), the size of the preference flow they receive from the Greens increases as well.

The only real difference between the ALP and the Coalition in this regard is the actual base level of Greens preference flows each party starts off with as a minimum level – with Labor probably starting from a minimum of around 60% and the Coalition starting from a minimum of around 15%.

A substantial number of Greens voters – at least around 20% – appear to be swinging voters in terms of their preference allocations, behaving just like voters that swing between the major parties, except they do so with their preferences.

Possum concludes:

As we see from the Nielsen data, increased generic popularity delivers primary votes and preference flows. If a party is popular generally, that popularity also becomes reflected via increased Greens preferences.

Secondly, state based polls recently have been absolutely dire for Labor, and if the ALP vote is as weak as Galaxy in Queensland and Westpoll in WA indicate, then there are also implications for the composition of the Senate (if these polls are accurately measuring voting intentions, then they would translate into a Labor loss in the House of Representatives, as indicated by Nielsen last Monday).

I was initially inclined to discount Westpoll on the grounds of its small sample size, but I’m not so sure now after reading William Bowe’s analysis at The Poll Bludger:

The catch is that with a sample of just 400, the poll has a margin of error of about 5 per cent. However, it accords with the 63-37 result from WA in the most recent Nielsen poll, which would have involved a sample of about 150. If you add the two polls together, the margin of error comes down to about 4 per cent. At the lower end of that range is a swing against Labor of 4 or 5 per cent, which is what last week’s Brand poll pointed to if you distributed preferences as per the 2007 election.

Bowe goes on to make the important point that such low levels of ALP support also imperil the party’s vote in the Senate, and therefore change the calculations of what happens in the Senate more generally.

So, thirdly, we shouldn’t be assuming a Senate where The Greens hold the balance of power, because that is predicated on what Bowe now calls the “unsafe assumption” that Labor will win the election, and that Labor’s numbers in various states will improve, and the Coalition’s fall.

There are two factors here:

(a) The fight for the last spot often necessitates a flow of preferences from the major parties after they have attained quota; if Labor polls poorly in Senate primaries, there might not be sufficient preferences to elect a Green in the sixth spot in some states, if that candidate doesn’t attain quota;

(b) If the Coalition’s primary vote improves, and Labor’s continues to be at dire levels, the chance of the Coalition holding its own, or even picking up another seat or two, improves concomitantly.

Senate polling is rare and unreliable, but it’s obviously wrong to just proceed on the basis of previous assumptions made about the Senate outcome, if the picture in the House of Representatives is a prospective Labor defeat.

In short, things are not looking good.

It was once a centrepiece of the Federal Government’s election strategy, but now the emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been relegated to the shelf until at least 2013…

But Government sources say it was decided last week to remove the scheme from next month’s budget, bowing to the political reality that the Senate is unlikely to pass the ETS any time soon.

Um, Kevin, you’ll have a new Senate in June 2011 – or earlier, if you’re prepared to go with a double dissolution. Is it really going to take eighteen months after that to a) reach agreement between the Greens and the ALP (assuming that the conservatives remain implacably opposed, something that’s not guaranteed), and get the scheme up and running, given the mountain of bureaucratic preparation already done?

UPDATE: dk.au’s take.

UPDATE 2: A new post from me, on what Labor might be doing now.

The Liberals have one sensible option, and one only – fold their hand, and pass the thing.

Kevin Rudd’s strategy in 2007 was to minimise disagreement with John Howard except where a contrast on key issues was favourable to Labor. Abbott should learn the lesson. If he chooses to go down the oppose everything path he’s so far adopted (despite a slight shift of rhetoric earlier on health), he hands Rudd two advantages: the ability to paint him as a negative naysayer with no substantive policy alternatives, and continued focus on health all the way to the election – just where Rudd wants it to be.

It’ll be interesting to see which way Abbott goes. I suspect it may well be the negative road – because his leadership appears to have been premised on a bunch of angry Liberals railing at Malcolm Turnbull for having the gall to support the government when he thought it warranted. Naysaying is the default reflex of the opposition parties at the moment, but primal cries of rage are not election winners.

*As Bernard Keane points out, neither WA’s holding out nor the 1999 agreement on the GST poses a legal obstacle to the implementation of the health reforms. So there is a deal. The only obstacle is the Senate.